Dilemmas in Emergency Communication Policy

1 Dilemmas in Emergency Communication PolicyBy Dr. Peter SandmanOriginally published in: Emergency Risk Communication CDCynergy (CD-ROM) Centers forDisease Control and Prevention, Department of Health and Human Services February the Web at: is one of three articles I wrote for the CDC s CD-ROM on Emergency risk Communication . Based partly on my earlier Anthrax, Bioterrorism, and Risk Communication : Guidelines forAction ( ), this one deals with ten Dilemmas facingemergency Communication planners: versus secrecy versus refusal to speculate versus confidence alarming versus being reassuring human versus being professional apologetic versus being defensive versus centralization and individual control versus expert decision-making for denial and misery versus planning for panic on the side of caution versus taking chancesFor each of the ten Dilemmas , my own position leans toward the first of the two poles and thenatural instinct of communicators in mid- Emergency leans toward the project was supported in part by an appointment to the Research Participation Program forthe Office of Communication , Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, administered by theOak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an agreement between the Department ofEnergy and CDC.

2 Peter M. Sandman Many risk Communication documents, columns, and articles are available in Emergency Communication Policyby Peter M. SandmanCopyright 2002 by Peter M. Sandman September 2002 Every Emergency is different. At the same time, all emergencies are similar. And one of the key similarities is this: All emergencies pose pretty much the same Dilemmas of Communication this chapter I want to discuss ten such Dilemmas : versus secrecy .. or versus misleading statements versus refusal to speculate .. or versus treating speculation as fact versus confidence alarming versus being reassuring human versus being professional apologetic versus being defensive .. or versus being forward-looking versus centralization and individual control versus expert decision-making for denial and misery versus planning for panic on the side of caution versus taking chances For each of these ten Dilemmas , my own position leans toward the first of the two poles.

3 That is, I prefer candor to secrecy, speculation to refusal to speculate, etc. But these are Dilemmas ,not questions with obvious answers. Not everyone agrees with me. The disagreements take three forms, as follows:First, I am on one end of a continuum with respect to most of these Dilemmas . I doubt you llfind many risk Communication or crisis Communication experts that occupy the other extreme,but you can certainly find some with more moderate positions than , experts in Communication in non-risk and non-crisis situations almost invariably take positions that are more moderate than mine, and sometimes positions that are on the opposite extreme. That s because they re working from a different paradigm. They re used toaddressing apathetic publics, not aroused stakeholders (for more on this distinction, see myCDC article on the 2001 anthrax attacks, #head2).

4 Health educators, for example, are accustomed to working hard to get apathetic publics to takea health risk seriously enough. PR people are accustomed to working hard to get apatheticpublics to read the news story. Both may need to adjust to the less common and quitedifferent problem of addressing people who are not apathetic but upset, maybe even too and most important, in an actual crisis high-ranking people (such as politicians) are likely to take center stage. Their intuitions on most of these Dilemmas will be on the other side from 2my recommendations. Under the stress of a crisis, moreover, everyone s intuitions move even further in what I consider the wrong line: Your organization is not going to like doing much of what I probability that you will dislike my advice does not mean that the advice is necessarily sound. Sometimes advice is both unattractive and unwise.

5 What it does mean is that you re likely to have trouble giving my side a fair hearing especially if you wait till mid-crisis to consider these Dilemmas . I will stand a better chance if you are reading this in non-crisis mode, thinking about the message Policy recommendations you want to build into your Emergency Communication you are, I suggest the following process: think through your own position on each dilemma. Read what I have to say, read some more conventional advice, and bounce them both off your own calm on what you think would be best, not what you think your bosses will accept. to embed your judgments in case studies, real or hypothetical. For each scenario, think through what different approaches to the various Dilemmas would entail, and how they would be likely to play out. This should help clarify the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

6 Whenever you do a drill or tabletop exercise, work in some of these Communication Policy Dilemmas . involve the higher-ups. Explain why you support the position you do, but explain its downside as well. Get them working on concrete scenarios, so they too can explore what different approaches to the Dilemmas would actually mean in practice. Don t skip this step. There is no point in writing a terrific Policy section for your Emergency Communication plan, only to have it overruled in mid-crisis by senior people who had no idea what you had in mind. you have management buy-in, draft the Policy section of your plan. Try to go beyond platitudes. Use past examples and hypothetical examples to illustrate what you mean. Remember that bad examples are often more useful than anything else in helping readers understand what you want them to do.

7 And what you want them to avoid doing. Include a brief explanation of the rationales for your prescriptions, and include a brief (and sympathetic) explanation of the opposing case. share the draft widely with senior management, with politicians, with partners, stakeholders, critics, and even the general public. The best time to deal with criticism of your Emergency Communication policies is beforehand, when they re still in draft, when you can debate the Dilemmas in principle and struggle toward a consensus. Moreover,if people know in advance what your policies are, they are likelier to understand and 3accept them when the time comes. And perhaps most important, the more people know about your Emergency Communication policies, the likelier your organization is to stick to s a good way to think about these Dilemmas : There is truth on both sides.

8 You want to wind up somewhere in the middle. (I actually think you d be better off winding up somewhere between the middle and my corner, but let that go.) All the pressure and all your intuitions are going to be in one direction. So aim for the other extreme (my extreme) in order to reach the middle. I m not saying it isn t possible to go too far my way; it is. However, I suspect you won t have that problem. Your problem will be making yourself and your organization go far don t worry much about overshooting go as far as you the anthrax attacks of 2001, I gave a presentation to the Centers for Disease Controland Prevention on Anthrax, Bioterrorism, and Risk Communication : Guidelines for Action. The presentation was later written up into an article, featuring 26 recommendations on how to communicate during a bioterrorism Emergency .

9 That article is available on my web site and is one of the reference documents incorporated into ERC CDCynergy. The organization of this chapter, by Dilemmas instead of recommendations, is new for me. The chapter includes some content that s also in the anthrax article, as well as a lot of new content. There is also content in the anthrax article that is not here. For the convenience of readers who want to know more, the discussion of each dilemma includes hyperlinks to the relevant recommendations in the anthrax Candor versus secrecy .. or versus misleading statementsFor more information on this topic, see: Protect Your Credibility and Reduce the Chances ofPanic with Candor ( #15)One of the most difficult decisions organizations face in Emergency situations is what information to reveal, what information to withhold, and what information to shape so it gives the impression you want to give.

10 Of course, nobody ever recommends dishonesty; all Communication manuals endorse telling the truth. But many readers will interpret this in the narrowest possible way: Don t tell flat-outlies. The real issue isn t lying. It is shaping (that is, distorting) the impression you give your audience by choosing which truths to tell and how to tell them. Consider this example from the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. In the midst of the crisis, when many things were going wrong, the utility put out a news release claiming that the plant was cooling according to design. Months later I asked the PR director how he could justify such a statement. He explained that nuclear power plants are designed to cool even when serious mistakes have been made. Despite his company s mistakes, therefore, the plant was indeed coolingaccording to design. Needless to say, his argument that he hadn t actually lied did not keepthe misleading statement from irreparably damaging the company s credibility.